


It's okay to cry, Becca.

by GraceEliz



Series: Why don't we just break the rules already? [6]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Gotham, Lots of Angst, backstories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-14
Updated: 2019-11-14
Packaged: 2021-01-30 20:44:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21434434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GraceEliz/pseuds/GraceEliz
Summary: Becca (an OC belonging to) is feeling horribly constrained, constricted by the house and her uncomfortable past. It takes Harvey to pull her out of it, and there is an offloading of emotion for both parties.
Series: Why don't we just break the rules already? [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1395790
Comments: 3
Kudos: 5





	It's okay to cry, Becca.

**Author's Note:**

> This is for the lovely Madi. This fic is set in 2019, winter. Madi is unlikely to make many appearances in my fics, but if you like her I will see about writing her in to some of the tales.

Most of the time the Manor is safe, trustworthy, but today she feels like the walls are shutting in and she can’t get out or do anything and there’s no escape and yes, Bruce says it’s okay to feel that way, and no she isn’t afraid of the Manor no matter how terrified she is of the Cave. The Cave is a thing of terror that can somehow manifest into a human body on occasion due to a magical explosion a few years ago. It only has any affection for Bruce and the Manor itself, not that the Manor is alive. And apparently Ed Nygma. Tim muttered something about a fifteen hour game of riddles, but she’s confused because the Cave can’t possibly be that sort of sentient. Right? Right.

Houses and holes in the earth can’t do maths.

That shouldn’t even be something she has to think about. Yet. Here she is in sat on the bottom step of the grand staircase, polished marble and mahogany, staring over at the ornate library doors behind which her beloved Jay is studying. He’s getting his doctorate this year, spending one day a week teaching in the University, and he loves his work. There are more books scattered around the Manor than she ever remembers seeing. 

She has some next to her. 

“Hey Bex,” rasps Harvey from behind her. She waves a finger in acknowledgement, not saying anything. Outside it’s wet and windy, almost a hurricane, the Bats and Birds working during the day to get people out of the Narrows. Harvey has the smell of floodwater in his skin, as they all do. Becca struggles to understand this family she has become a part of, the three billionaires and the boy from the Narrows and their extended families. She has family, Alfred, Bruce and Jason, all the other Wayne and Stark children. 

She feels alone so terribly. 

“Aw, Bex,” he sits beside her, solid and warm and so much smaller than Bruce, “Feels too small in the house, huh.”

“How can you know that?” Becca snaps. 

He looks at her calmly out of the corner of his eye. “I belong here, but I belong out there too. We all do, and we all feel to be in the wrong place sometimes.”  
“Not Bruce,” she says certainly, “He knows who he is.” Of course he does, he is Bruce the father, Batman the night, Rob the best friend (she isn’t one of the people who uses that nickname. She hasn’t earned that), and Rabbie or Brucie the man about town who can drink most people under the table in much the manner of his father before him. Their escapades are famous all over Gotham. 

Harvey hums. “We don’t truly ever know who we are. This family, we know better than most.” He falls quiet, but she can almost taste in the air that he is collecting words to speak. “We have learned ourselves by being forced to. Faced with the lives of those you love against the lives of Gotham, you have to make a decision.”

Becca thinks she knows what he’s talking about, but the Bat’s business isn’t a subject she knows masses about. Not really. Not when planets are in the balance, whole nations. Those aren’t the details Bruce gives to his children and younger friends, not out of a lack of trust or love but because the life he leads carries too many burdens – she knows she has enough of her own. 

“Bruce, he knows what he has to be. We all do. But as kids – we knew nothing. How can you know yourself when you’re a lost kid?”

“Huh.”

Harvey throws her a wry grin. “But Bruce, he lived with me for a bit. We used to split time, see, go stay with Tonio or Lex,” he trails off in remembrance.

She hadn’t known. Bruce, in the time she’s known him, has always been a set quantity. Not a quantity she has ever known how to count, but set. The idea of him as a teenager with no direction knocks her off balance.

“See, Tony and Lex, they’re older. Bruce is the baby. Growing up, well, they were the most important people. Our favourite people. His brothers more than mine, more shared history, but by time we were 12 the four of us were inseparable.” He’s smiling into the past know, holding Becca’s full attention. She’s heard the stories like the whole family has, was even living in the Manor when certain recent incidents occurred. They’re so much fun, her Bruce and his brothers. “And Bruce, he was the worst. Me, I hated my dad see. My mom wasn’t much cop really – she wasn’t any good – I start talking like Alfie sometimes – and so I brought myself up on the streets. I had one room in the worst flat, knocked down now, and you know how bad it was when you grew up? It was worse, then. What’s the worst disease you remember?”

“Sickness. A horrible throwing up and diarrhoea bug, I was thirteen,” she whispers, unwilling to break the trust Harvey was giving her.

“Aye,” he snorts, “Flux. I had TB. TB, missed the cholera, got typhoid. Bloody consumption.”

“Doesn’t tuberculosis kill?”

“Aye, but you only need six months of treatment. Six months of antibiotics to cure a disease that was killing people until just before you were born.”

“I remember,” she whispers. Her life, it’s been hard, but it wasn’t that bad when she was that young. The diseases and horror of the ‘old days’ were gone by her birth, erased by the efforts of Bruce Wayne the Prince of Gotham and his dear friend Harvey Dent the White Knight. Pneumonia, of course, is still rampant, but that’s a Gotham illness as opposed to a Narrows only illness. That’s not saying her home region isn’t the worst in the city, it is, but she caught pneumonia aged 14 and it lasted a few weeks. Harvey’s TB must have been agony. And typhoid? That’s similar, isn’t is? What she does know is that cholera kills. The first cholera outbreak in Britain was 1832, but it’s always been in America. It seems Jay’s love of useless knowledge is rubbing off on her. Harvey continues his speech. 

“But then I had Bruce, you know? He picked me up off the streets. He heard me coughing, and he’s so good, innately, even in his bad times, that he used to feed me and give me the odd blanket or coat. I don’t know what we saw in each other, really. An heir, the Wayne heir at that, and a pauper.”

“It’s like a movie,” she says with a half-smile. When Becca is with Harvey the itch of her ‘evil’ is lessened; she has never felt that the evil of her father (may he burn for all eternity) matters. 

The silence settles like tissue paper between them, safe and secure with that hint of vulnerable fragility that the unloading of secrets carries. Becca knows she will never breathe a word of this to anyone but Bruce and Harvey. These are not her secrets to share. Abruptly, she realises her nagging claustrophobia has dispersed during the course of her rapture.   
“Why did you stay in Gotham?”

Harvey stares at the ornate tiling. “Well.”

He falls quiet, takes a deep slow breath, continues, “This city is not limited. We are a city of industry, but also art. Look at Old Gotham, look at the architecture. It’s beautiful. Look at the people. We get drowned and attacked and we fall time and again yet we are still here. Gotham was hell on Earth; a hero rose. The Pits under the city – ”

Becca hurtles to her feet when she registers his words, staring down at Harvey in horror as understanding blooms. Dimly she notices the bad weather has made his scarred skin even tighter, red and hot. There are Lazarus Pits under Gotham. That explains rather a lot. How do Pits even work? 

“I’ll tell you if you truly want to know.”

“I didn’t want to say that out loud,” Becca admits distantly. Her head is reeling, connecting what she knows of the Lazarus Pits with what she remembers of Gotham’s history, and the various catastrophes of her teenage years in a tangle of concepts and emotions. She can’t make sense of it. There are Lazarus Pits under Gotham: there are horrors she is sure that not even an author could imagine alone. 

So lost is she in her thoughts that she doesn’t protest when Harvey winds her arm through his. They walk slowly down to the kitchen; it feels for all the world like a stroll in the maze on a sunny summer afternoon. Who discovered the Pit? Had it affected every citizen of Gotham? They’re certainly supernatural, magical, but to what extent? Is anyone recording their findings?   
The heavy kitchen door is shut behind them, Harvey clicking the latch carefully. There are certain areas of ‘sacred’ ground in the Manor: the kitchen, Bruce’s room, Alfred’s quarters, and the libraries unless permission is given to include them in their play. When the kitchen door is wide open one is welcome to enter, half closed would signify ‘knock before entry’, and all the way closed means to knock and wait unless emergency. Everyone in the Manor has used the kitchen as a bolthole in times of distress and they have all, at least once, walked into the door with a thud and a bruise. Harvey guides her gently into a chair, running a hand over her arm affectionately. 

Making tea is somewhat ritualised in Wayne Manor. Growing up with Alfred, both Bruce and Harvey make a hot drink in times of even mild distress. Filling and boiling the kettle is a simple task, followed by listening to it boil as cups are collected and the teapot emptied of old teabags and cold tea. Reach up for a new bag; stand and listen to the final boil of the kettle. Then comes the wait for it to brew. Harvey, like Jason, brings the pot to the table for this stage, setting it on the old glass mat, then draws down a packet of shortbread from the stash of emergency biscuits. 

What Becca loves about this family is there is no pressure to interact during these rituals. Hot tea and biscuits or scones will be provided, along with a listening ear. Bruce is a big believer in late night tea. As for herself, she’s not a huge tea drinker. The sound out pouring tea isn’t one she thinks she can describe. Harvey settles down to drink. 

“My grandad was English, you know,” he says after a few sips. 

Becca blinks in surprise, looking up from the swirling steam of her tea. Harvey is sat opposite her at the kitchen table staring out of the window at the rain and hail lashing the house. 

“He bred horses, but the in the wars people didn’t want the Fell ponies. Too small for big ploughing like in the south. Too big to be pit ponies.”

She can’t see how this is relevant, this recounting of Englishness, but it’s the most Harvey has ever told her of his life. How often over the years has she sat in the library or den or out in one of the gardens and listened to the older men talk?

“But my dad, he was cruel. Seb, they called him. No good for ponies is cruelty – and he kept the accent. You can hear it in my voice too. I lived up there in the fells of North England for a few years. Bleak. Bleak and steep and freezing cold and always flooded or draught.”

“Why?”

“Why not,” he shrugs, “Bruce needed a getaway. The city didn’t need a Batman. It did us good.”

Becca’d had no idea they’d lived in England. Why not? Surely they’d talked about that, surely she would have noticed. 

“But back to me – Bruce bought me my first shoes. Boots like in Dickens films and stuff, brown stiff thick-soled leather. We were ten.”

Bloody hell, at least she had a childhood. Even Jay’s wasn’t full of disease and he was loved for the early stages of it by his mom, as best as she managed that. “I thought you were from the better end of the Narrows. It’s all bad but they don’t ever go without,” says Becca in awe.

Harvey snorts. “I had nothing. There was no water in my building most days. We had a swingpump. A swingpump, Bex. When I had TB, Bruce kept me alive. Stole for me, even. You couldn’t leave the Narrows at that point – we were so riddled by disease they had a pass system. Nobody moved out, but you could move in. People were born and people died. I remember, when I was a kid, probably only eight or so, the air smelled of burned meat.”

“Oh my god,” she chokes involuntarily, “Oh god.”  
“You burn the bodies.” Harvey is grim, lost in the memories. Wind screams around the chimneys and cornices of the Manor. Jason hasn’t left the library. Becca remembers the smell, when there’d been an accident in a factory and the bodies had to be disposed of. She wonders if Harvey can watch films where bodies are mass burned. They’re all so messed up it might not matter anymore. “What had happened, was that one of the mills – we have no mills left, now – one of them lit up. Think some fool worker lit up a cigarette. Then, boom. The cotton goes up. 46 people dead as a result.”

Cotton mills. In the depths of her memory Becca can remember the high whistles of the mills, the tramp of the working men, the last mill closing when she was seven or so. Nowadays labour is different. The factories are assembly lines, and people work on the docks more than in the factories. Bruce has overhauled most industries to make them far safer, providing protective clothing and insurances. There has never been a time where Wayne wasn’t the biggest name in Gotham – even when Bruce was on his travels, he still made the papers. She used to collect clippings about the disasters. She hasn’t thought about that scrapbook in years.

“Harvey? Thank you,” she murmurs, “I hadn’t known.”  
Harvey smiles at her. So much pain, and yet, Harvey has never been a cruel man. Two Face is cruel, or at least used to be. “After everything I’ve done, I have a place here still, Becca. You have done bad things. We all have. There was a time before Bruce’s no-kill rule.”

No, impossible.

“That’s enough for tonight,” says Harvey suddenly. His mug clinks on the tabletop. He stands, runs his scarred hand through her hair, leaves the room. Becca is left alone, with too much to think about.

“Becca?”

It’s Jason. “Hi,” she croaks. Jay looks down at her, eyes fond.

“It’s okay to cry, Becca.”

She does, letting all the old grief and new anguish rise through her. The history Harvey told her aches deep in her soul, brings all her old griefs to the surface to burst in the hard muscles of Jay’s chest, to splash salty tears on the table.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, leave requests and comments! I love hearing theories and headcanons.


End file.
